"Over-reliance on the importance of computer-based technology in the school"

News:
Nov 16, 2015

There is an inexplicable and excessive optimism regarding what digital tools should be able to accomplish in terms of learning in Swedish schools. That is the opinion of Catarina Player-Koro, associate professor at the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies (IDPP), whose research examines the expectations of digital tools in relation to what is actually happening in the schools.

In a lecture at the Research in Progress conference in November, Catarina Player- Koro presented a historical overview of what the discussion surrounding the introduction of computers and other digital tools looks like in Sweden.It is a journey that has about 45 years of history and ends up in various places, including today’s municipal initiatives to provide a digital tool for each and every student, the so-called 1:1 initiatives.“The digital technology has been accepted, but it has notchanged the school at all as many believed it would. It is stillall about traditional teaching in traditional classrooms, onlynow the students communicate and seek information with theircomputers. If we want to change the school, we must do it inways other than just by buying technology,” says CatarinaPlayer-Koro.“There is good reason to examine who controls the rhetoricand for what purpose, and the teachers and school leaders arenow taking back the initiative on the issue of the purpose andgoals of digitisation.”

Few positive changes

In an overview of the available research, Catarina Player-Korohas examined some 600 scientific articles that touch on therelationship between IT and learning.“95 per cent of the articles start out from the premise that technologyaffects learning, which is based on an optimistic stancewhere the view is that the possibilities are inherent and built-inin the technology.”In the larger studies that have been performed concerning whatdigital technology is all about, major positive changes for theschools are rarely seen.“Strangely enough, the positive rhetoric continues. Argumentssuch as ‘the benefits will arrive when the technology is usedmore often,’ or ‘the schools are not using the technology as intended,’are prevalent. The technological determinism, a reductionisttheory that presumes that technology drives developmentand solves problems, and does things by itself, is strong anddeeply rooted, but this is something that must be questioned.If not, we will not be able to find out what it is actually possibleto do in a digital learning environment,” stresses CatarinaPlayer-Koro.

National IT strategies

In September 2015, the national Government gave the NationalAgency for Education the mandate of proposing national ITstrategies for the school system.“It is stated there that the proposals inter alia contain changesin both the curricula and syllabi in order to clarify the inclusionof computer programming as an element in the teaching. Aninteresting observation in relation to this is that powerful forcesfrom various directions, including the business community,have put forward arguments promoting the need for programmingin the schools using the same rhetoric that was used inthe 1980s when computer science became part of the Swedishschool system,” Catarina Player-Koro reminds us.Her view is that the argument that programming promotesparticipation in society and democracy, and that knowledge ofprogramming promotes structured thinking, once again involvesa belief in digital technology that is as strong as it was some40 years ago.“The problem is quite simply that this was never achievedduring the period when programming was taught in theschools. One should take into account to a greater extent thelessons learned from past experience and the results from previousIT investments targeted at schools.”Catarina Player-Koro believes that the huge profits for IT companiesshould be looked at and discussed.“The companies anchor themselves in a real school problemthat they are very good at presenting an overly simplistic solutionto. The schools then feel that ‘they have to get on thebandwagon’, and the governing politicians are not professionallyversed or knowledgeable enough to see through this. Thisis a really serious problem.”